This disclosure relates to a method for separating mycotoxin-contaminated corn kernels from uncontaminated corn kernels. More particularly, the disclosure relates to separating aflatoxin-contaminated corn kernels from uncontaminated corn kernels.
Mycotoxins are a broad range of toxic materials produced by the growth of fungi on foods. Aflatoxin is a class of mycotoxins produced by the action of fungi, most commonly produced by members of Aspergillus section Flavi, on grain, seeds, kernels or nuts. Aflatoxin can affect grains such as corn and hops, oilseeds, such as cottonseed, soybean, almonds, Brazil nuts, pecans, pistachios, etc.
There are required limits on the amount of aflatoxin and other mycotoxins in products, particularly products which could be used as food or feed. There have been attempts to detoxify aflatoxin-contaminated food or feed sources such as corn, but in general these have had very limited success, often with undesirable side effects, either flavor degradation or destruction of the product itself. Therefore, the general treatment of aflatoxin-contaminated material is to attempt to separate the aflatoxin-contaminated material from the uncontaminated material. Various methods for sorting and removing contaminated corn are known, for example, optical detection (e.g., by color of the corn, or by overall damage to the corn).
Generally, the amount of contamination of a corn, grain, seed or nut product is measured by the parts per billion (ppb) or parts per million (ppm) aflatoxin in a sample of the product. If the parts per billion is below the acceptable limit for the end use, the sample or lot of material will be processed. However, if sampling misses several highly contaminated materials, some of the final product could be very high in aflatoxin even though the lot sampled at low aflatoxin level. Also, sampling variations can cause basically good lots of product to test high and be declared unusable. Therefore, a process which would separate contaminated product, particularly that which appears to be uncontaminated, is highly valuable. This process would allow the separation of contaminated products from other uncontaminated whole products, thus lowering the mycotoxin or aflatoxin level in the entire batch.